


by any other name

by Dorkangel



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Conspiracy Theories, Crack Treated Seriously, Fin-Galad, Gen, History, Identity of Gil-Galad, Sea-longing, Secret Identity, Succession Crisis, What if there were four of them huh, personal monarchy is already so goddamn weird this might as well happen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-13
Updated: 2019-06-13
Packaged: 2020-04-24 17:52:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19178383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dorkangel/pseuds/Dorkangel
Summary: A monarch cannot be a private person. In many ways, they exist only as a public persona - and more than one prince might assume that persona. In times of crisis people are not particularly inclined to question such things. After all: there must always be a king.*Tuor had laughed outright, when this suggestion was first made to him. He had stopped only when he realised Círdan had not intended it to be a joke.“We can’t just pretend that Artanáro is still alive.” he objected. “People will notice.”“They will accept it if it comforts them,” countered Círdan, refusing to acknowledge that he well knew how ridiculous this charade would be. “Besides,” he went on, tired. “I suspect it would not be the first time.”





	by any other name

A monarch cannot be a private person. They belong to their people, to their country, to their government; they are inextricable from their decrees and their decisions. Some of the monarchs of Middle Earth knew this, and how to accept it - Thingol, Turgon, Galadriel. Others feared or resented it, fled from it when they could - Maedhros, Fingon, Elrond. Most found an uneasy compromise.

And one only ever existed in the eyes of his people.

Well - it is not quite so simple. Certain persons undeniably existed, and they ruled over certain groups for somewhat contentious periods of time, and took between them a common identity. But the idea, the historical concept, of King Gil-Galad that came to exist after he had passed beyond the world, was born in the collective memory of the elves of the Third Age, and allowed to thrive as those with partial understanding of the truth stayed strategically silent. He did not always exist.

The truth of the matter, as far as Valinorean historians of the Sixth Age were able to discover, is this:

In the late fourth century of the First Age, Prince Orodreth of Nargothrond and his wife Nettë had two children together: the first, a beautiful daughter, Finduilas, and the second, a burbling baby boy they called Artanáro - Rodnor, in the language of his mother. He was given the name because he was born with a shock of pale gold for hair, so arresting that his grandfather had compared him instantly to his great-aunt Artanis; a sign of great things to come, so all the king’s advisors had assured the parents. They did not call him Ereinion, of course - they called him Orodrethion, and crown prince, since the succession of the Noldor had always belonged only to the male line.

The second thing that everybody noticed was how much he looked like his sister. Finduilas, barely out of infancy herself, had delighted in her brother, proudly showing him off to her playmates; in their games, he and Gwindor would take a side together against their older siblings, and Finduilas and Gelmir would fight them off with affectionate caution.

But all of these children were born under a Doom, and such bubbles of peace were not allowed to last. The Doom came to Gelmir in battle, and to the other three in the form of a blood-stained man; though Túrin mourned, he made use of himself as a soldier, and sparred often with the curious young prince - gently, for Rodnor had his great-uncle Finrod’s charm and diplomatic graces, but unlike his sister, he was never a great warrior. She had come to watch them fight, and to call out tips, and Túrin had not objected when she joined him in defending her kingdom on patrols. Though it was Finduilas who had fallen in love with him, Rodnor, too, was said to enjoy his company.

When a dragon followed Túrin to Nargothrond, when Orodreth and Nettë and Gwindor were dead at Tumhalad, Finduilas donned armour and fought. She was in the thick of the fighting, but she was nowhere near Glaurung; the battle spanned the entire city, after all, and fleeing elves had need of troops to keep them safe from orcs, to put down the fires rising around them. In the darkness and choking heat of the smoke, she was separated far from the rest of the royal family.

Rodnor fought too: inexpertly, unarmoured, and far too near the dragon. He was injured badly on his sword arm, so that he was unable to defend himself against the orcs who seized him and chained him as a captive, and when they drove him past the hypnotised and helpless Túrin he wore his throat raw screaming for aid.

After the battle, Túrin ran north-west towards Dor-Lómin in a trance. Finduilas and the survivors of the sack fled south-east along the Narog to where it met the River Sirion. Rodnor, Crown Prince Artanáro of the Noldor, was murdered by his captors near Teiglin, and buried by the Haladin who found his body - who were very kind to do so, and grieved that they could not save him, but could not, in truth, tell the difference between a male and female elf, especially an attractive young elf with waist-length golden hair dressed in, by Edain standards, feminine long skirts. They named his grave _Haudh-en-Elleth_ , the Mound of the Elfmaid, and all who heard its name presumed that it was Finduilas who lay beneath it.

Sheltering in the forest of Nan-Tathren and finally sure that they were safe, Finduilas had lifted the visor of her helm only, and turned to face her people.

They had greeted her as King Artanáro, and she had been too shocked to refute them. As news had reached them, that night, of Haudh-en-Elleth, of the scattering of the Haladin and the deaths of the captives, she had realised her situation. _Someone has to be king._ King Fingon was dead. Turgon of Gondolin was hidden away somewhere, too closed off from his subjects to even communicate. _There must be a king._

With a strange calm, she had put on her brother’s robes over her armour, and dressed her hair as he had always. And if the survivors of Nargothrond knew that she had ever been otherwise, they knew, too, that in this time of crisis they needed a leader, and for eleven years they had gladly accepted her rule.

Eleven years is not a long time to an elf. But it was long enough for Finduilas - Artanáro, to the Noldor of the time, Pseudo-Ereinion I to the historians - to lead the people of Nargothrond to the borders of Doriath and plead for asylum from King Thingol, on account of his ancient kinship with her, that she was his great-great-great-niece, and their fear that if he abandoned them to travel all the way west they would be subject to the increasingly bold orcs and beasts of the wilderness. He had accepted, and for a decade she had been hailed, largely in her absence, as High King of the Noldor in Beleriand.

And then in 503, Thingol had died, and his wife had let the barriers of magic that encircled Doriath disintegrate, and three years later the sons of Fëanor - all of whom had acknowledged Artanáro as their king - fell upon Doriath, and destroyed it the mindless red haze of their Oath. Her Noldorin armour as she battled Curufin Fëanorion beside Dior and Nimloth had, to his mind, marked her out as a follower of Fëanor who had turned on them, as some did, and he slew her without a second thought. Later, Amrod Fëanorion, barely paying attention to anything but his grief for the three of his brothers who had died and his horror at his own actions, had burned her body on a pyre along with all the rest of the anonymous fallen.

And once again, there was no king. But in the chaos of a Beleriand whose governments had collapsed with the Nírnaeth Arnœdiad anyway, it took a far longer time than it should have for anybody to notice.

By the time that nearly all of the refugees of Nargothrond, Doriath, and Gondolin had made their way to the Havens of Sirion, it was becoming clear that, while all of them were fairly sure that there was a High King of the Noldor somewhere, this king was nowhere to be found. In his role of the Lord of the Havens, Círdan of the Falmari began to investigate.

Círdan’s private opinion had always been that if Fingon had managed to pretend to marry someone life would be much simpler. Finwë, no matter what else he may have done, had at least produced thirteen direct male heirs before his death; if Fingon had managed to name a child from _somewhere_ his heir, the succession would not have been sent spiralling into Valar-know-where with Turgon and then Finarfin’s lines. Still, though: Fingon was long dead, and in the meantime there was, apparently, an _Artanáro_ in Beleriand.

It became clear after a few years of searching that this obscure prince was almost certainly dead. This could be kept from the elves settled at Sirion, Círdan reasoned, but not forever. Something had to be done. There must always be a king - who, precisely, that king was, mattered not at all, especially to someone as old as Círdan, whose birth had preceded the formal creation of such monarchies by several thousand years. He turned to Turgon’s nearest descendent as he pondered what to do.

Princess Idril of Gondolin, by this time in history, had survived disaster after disaster, and clung to her family with both hands. She had lived her life barred from the monarchy, but nevertheless moving within its deepest, smallest circles, and she wanted nothing less than the responsibility of power forced on her son - Tuor, too, had recovered somewhat from the painfully shy and half-wild young man that Voronwë had led to Gondolin, but would never cease in his life on the Hither Shore to reject the kingdoms of men, who had never been anything to him but cruel. And so Eärendil, who was by birthright the heir to the thrones of the Edain and Noldor both, was in practice prince of neither.

Besides, even Círdan could acknowledge that Eärendil was hardly a suitable candidate. He was very young - adolescent, by the standards of men, and, no matter the evidence of his encroaching physical maturity, _obscenely_ young by the standards of elves - and from the first moment that he had been considered safe to play unsupervised, he had been drawn unfalteringly towards the sea. He had on several occasions nearly drowned; Círdan had personally intervened to teach him to swim. These feelings existed in Tuor too. The patronage of Ulmo, it seemed, had had consequences for the both of them.

For a few years there had existed a stand-off between Círdan, the handful of nobility aware that the existence of Artanáro was (at it had been for longer than they were aware and would continue to be for thousands of years more) a polite fiction, and Idril. It was only when Eärendil had announced his engagement to Elwing of Doriath that a solution made itself clear, and the Lord of the Havens had begun, incrementally, to relax.

The story of Elwing was its own tragedy, much of it public, but she was at least much more of a monarch than her betrothed; the inheritance of the Sindar had no such rules applied to it as that of the Noldor, and the regency of Elwing’s lords had only been necessary because she had been a babe upon her accession; not because of her gender. Any children she had with Eärendil - in this case, thankfully, far sooner than any elf would, as the peredhel had matured as fast as would mortals - could be raised to be the heirs of the Noldor and Edain, with their family around them so that the pressures would not be so great as if they had been simply thrust upon Eärendil. In a way it was very neat: her children would be princes of the Sindar too. Although, by this point, Oropher, Amdír, and Celeborn had already begun to divide up the Sindar and the confused and annoyed Nandor fairly neatly between the three of them, and the need for a single monarch was not great.

The only problem that remained to the Noldor was time. These children - these _sons_ \- would have to be born, grow, be educated, before they could ever ascend the throne. But time was not on their side; this was a settlement of refugees, all too aware that an attack could be coming at any moment. To calm the people, Círdan begged Idril and her son, an image must be presented of a present king, at least. Eärendil was blonde, with pointed ears; though his own preference was for the clothes of mortal men, and his hair barely brushed his shoulders, scandalously short for a Noldo, the appearance of an elf could be projected onto him if he was carefully dressed, his hair worn under ornate crowns to disguise the length.

Tuor had laughed outright, when this suggestion was first made to him. He had stopped only when he realised Círdan had not intended it to be a joke.

“We can’t just _pretend_ that Artanáro is still alive.” he objected. “People will notice.”

“They will accept it if it comforts them,” countered Círdan, refusing to acknowledge that he well knew how ridiculous this charade would be. “Besides,” he went on, tired. “I suspect it would not be the first time.”

(Historians rarely discuss ‘Pseudo-Ereinion II’. The whole affair is considered too much of a farce.)

The birth of Elrond and Elros was a massive relief to the entirety of the political classes of the Noldor, even those who were not aware that the facade of the king was just Eärendil dressed in ill-fitting cloaks, seen from behind.

If only they had more than six years to train the new monarchs before the Third Kingslaying, the plan might have worked.

But there was, fortunately, a second plan formed secretly. When Idril and Tuor travelled west, Círdan once again began to plot, worried that any son of Eärendil’s might face the same chronic sea-longing, and that, as no one seemed prepared to consider, there might not be any sons at all. And not long at all after their ship had sailed, fate had dropped an unexpected gift into his lap.

Among a group of newly arrived refugees come via Himring was a young ellon who called himself ‘Gil’. Círdan came into contact with as he volunteered to translate and make copies of necessary documents for the lord. His parents, Gil mentioned, had been escaped thralls of Morgoth; they had fled from Angband to Maedhros, and he had welcomed them more kindly than would most, and so they had died fighting for him. Gil did not say _who_ they had fought, and Círdan suspected kinslaying. Still, though: no one could prove such a thing. It was Maedhros, added the lad, that gave him the Elvish name ‘ _star_ ’ - rather than the Black Speech one his parents had used, originally - because of his bright eyes.

Bright blue eyes, Círdan noted. And black hair, and warm-toned dark skin. Those features, individually, could all have come from anywhere, but all together, they gave him rather a look of Finwë about him. With an angry set to his brows, he could have been a descendent of Fëanor by one son or another; with gold braided into his hair, he could have been a miniature Fingon. And Fingon always did have that reputation - never married, and more prone to flirtations and scandalous little affairs than most elves; closer with Maedhros than with anybody else, of course, but then, Gil _had_ come to the Havens from Maedhros’s domain…

Gil was King Fingon’s son, Círdan mentioned casually to a particularly talkative messenger, without bothering to ask leave or pardon from the ellon in question. Fingon's _illegitimate_ son, he strongly implied. The rumour was common knowledge by the next day. And although the higher classes among the elves were very much aware of mortal laws restricting such progeny from their natural inheritances, no such laws had ever been written for the Noldor. Why would they have been? In the Years of the Trees there had been no such issue. Moreover, in the Years of the Trees, there would have been time for these kinds of problems to be solved.

This was Beleriand in crisis. There was no time.

Gil-Galad, as Círdan now advised him to call himself, was highly confused, but not entirely resistant to the idea. He knew his own ability, in battle and in politics. Eärendil had embraced him with relief, and the few indignant questions largely concerning the colour of his hair had been quelled by vague noises about being fostered in Nargothrond and lightening dyes. _Gil-Galad_ , _Rodnor_ \- they communicate more or less the same idea, shining light.

There were not many questions raised, though many noted the oddity. Perhaps half of the Noldor simply didn’t care, and the other half chose to hope that whatever was happening was happening to best protect them from the Enemy. The handful of people who had actually known one or both of the original Artanáros fell largely into this second category. Prominent among them was Celebrimbor, who had bowed politely to Gil-Galad, and then made pointed eye contact with Círdan, who stood beside the young king; Celebrimbor had lived long years in Nargothrond, his gaze said, and he knew that this was not the prince that he had known, and Círdan’s gaze back a calm warning that any word from Celebrimbor on this topic would be easily discredited as Fëanorian lies.

Perhaps Celebrimbor observed the conduct of the king and decided to hold his tongue. It is also possible that the deciding factor was the almost indiscernible Fëanorian lisp audible in Gil-Galad’s most formal Quenya.

Eärendil and Elwing’s sons were still the heirs presumptive. The hope of everyone involved was that Gil-Galad would lead his adopted people through the conflicts of a fraught Beleriand, and then once Elrond and Elros were grown, he would abdicate and all would return to its normal, rightful place. He ruled only so long as he had the consent of the people to rule, as most had a vague idea that his claim to the throne was at least somewhat suspect, and as functionally a regent he was popular and respected.

But no sooner than the last doubts about this affair had been quelled, the sons of Fëanor fell on the Havens of Sirion, and suddenly there were no other heirs, no other alternatives. All the elves of Middle Earth were plunged again into war and chaos, and even if the peredhel twins had not been held hostage by the last surviving Fëanorions, they were six years old, only young children by the reckoning of mortals, and scarcely even toddlers in the eyes of elves. The Noldor must have a king, and they needed a warrior king.

Gil had been carrying the responsibilities of a high king for almost eight years at this point, and knew what was required of him. He grew up on the frontlines of a warzone, with two soldiers for parents; in the eyes of the public, his ‘father’ was a famously valiant warrior, and his father’s lover had led the greatest alliance of free peoples the world had ever known. He was charismatic and ruthless, and very brave. He knew his own competency, but made no effort to impress it on others.

Most people did not ask too many questions.

Hidden away somewhere, Maedhros and Maglor most certainly asked questions. On one occasion Elros, quite covered in mud and looking nothing at all like the princeling he had been born to be, had mentioned that “Ada was the king, sometimes”, and they began from this to put the pieces together about the sudden appearance of this _Ereinion_ , though they still wondered who in Aman was being hailed as _son of kings,_ of all the vague titles possible.

(Gil-Galad - Pseudo-Ereinion III, as he would come to be known - was the only one of the three imposter kings to ever actually use the name _Ereinion_ ; he is said to have improvised it during a speech, unable to bring himself to lie and use _Fingonion_ , and unable for obvious reasons to admit to being _son of Búrz._ )

For the same reason that his subjects, the lords of the Sindar, Galadriel, Celebrimbor, and his Edain allies did not question Gil-Galad’s rule, Maedhros and Maglor eventually decided that it was in the best interests of everybody in Aman if they left well alone and allowed King Ereinion to do the duties he seemed so capable of. It was only when they sent the peredhel away, nearly two decades later - when they ‘exchanged their hostages for supplies’, as went the polite fantasy, while the twins clung to them and wept - that the truth had become clear. Maedhros, glancing down from his horse at the king, had exclaimed “Gil!”, and had to quite hastily add a “Galad…!”

Later, Gil-Galad confessed the secret of his identity to Elros willingly, as the young man had floundered in self-doubt, newly a man, newly a king of men. He had conferred the same secret on Elrond, and both twins had kept it for him, full of affection and gratitude that he would give them his trust.

Suffice to say that High King Finarfin was surprised to discover who was High King in Beleriand, when he arrived from Aman with the host of the Valar. But the interrogation that Gil-Galad and his advisors had braced themselves for never arrived - there was not even an awkward conversation. Instead, Finarfin quite suddenly broke royal protocol and ceremony to pull his daughter and her husband (whom he had never met) from the onlooking crowd into an enthusiastic embrace, and then turned to do the same to the one surviving grand-nephew he remembered from before the Darkening, no matter how close he and Celebrimbor had not been then. Elrond, still only young and somewhat immature, had disguised his laughter as an unconvincing cough. Only then had Finarfin turned to the king, glowing with happiness and with the light of the Trees that still shone unfiltered in his eyes.

“And of course, your grace!” he greeted. His bow was in the antiquated, almost Vanyarin style; Gil-Galad, formal though he was as he bowed back, did not even attempt the same. When he rose, Finarfin’s arms were open again.

“No matter our relation, you will be my brother,” he promised, all joy.

Any questions that anyone watching might have had about how Finrod Felagund had made friends of men, dwarves, and elves of all peoples were answered in the conduct of his father. And any remaining shreds of doubt about the rule of Gil-Galad, even after Elrond, Elros - by then, Tar-Minyatur of Númenor - and Finarfin had acknowledged him were overshadowed by his triumph in the War of Wrath. In case, the Second Age was a new beginning for all involved, and many things were conveniently forgotten: for example that Galadriel, the new Lady of Lothlórien, had once been Artanis of the Noldor, and that Oropher of the line of Elmo had far less of a claim to the throne of Eryn Lasgalen than his elder cousin Celeborn, or even that those two lands had indigenous populations who would have been quite capable of selecting leaders from amongst themselves, if permitted. Amongst all that, remembering the deliberately obfuscated fact that King Ereinion was perhaps not all he seemed was rather difficult.

So the whispers about Gil-Galad’s identity, specifically about his parentage, first died down, then rose up again. They had come initially on the lips of his critics, and then as jokes from his court, who of course found them hilarious. Publically, Gil-Galad did not grace them with a response - when Elrond repeated them to him in private, he groaned unregally.

“I don’t think these jokes are a threat,” he admitted thoughtfully, when Celebrían asked. “But I think they say something interesting. My heir isn’t my son either -”

“- and I’m not even really your heir.” finished Elrond. It was not the same for him as it had been for Tuor or Eärendil; he was not afflicted with sea-longing, but found himself disillusioned with the whole office of the monarchy, and desperately unwilling to govern. In an emergency of the kind they prayed would never happen again, he agreed that he would lead in battle and in politics. But though he knew from his childhood kidnappers never to swear anything so portentous before the Valar, he promised Gil-Galad, Círdan, and every other person in Middle Earth with any investment in the monarchy of the Noldor that he would never allow himself to be called high king.

“Then something must change.” offered Celebrían; she was, after all, a child of the Second Age, born into a time when such monarchies had already shown themselves to be thoroughly flawed.

Over the course of almost three and a half thousand years, as Lindon and Eregion flourished under his reign and the realms of wood-elves, dwarves, and men flourished beside them, Gil-Galad began to dismantle the machinery of the power of a personal monarch over the Noldor. _Are we not elves?_ he had written to his subjects, in response to the raised eyebrows he received from some. _Are you not wise and old enough to govern yourselves?_ It became clear after not very long that they would not embrace a true democracy, but he could at the least make sure that power was shared and balanced - and, Elrond suggested coyly, able to be displaced from one individual to another through means other than blood.

It would have been very difficult - though perhaps possible - to establish this new system with the number of Noldor living in around the year 3000 of the Second Age.

No one, Elrond least of anybody, could ever claim that the utter devastation of their people and the destruction of Eregion was worth the justice of a government with no king. But that is what it allowed for.

Elrond ruled from Imlardis as a lord only, since that is where most of the Noldor who did not sail came to live after the War of the Last Alliance, and he intervened very rarely in the lives of those outside of his valley. As more and more sailed, Silvan and Sindarin elves came to live amongst them too, and travellers from all over Middle Earth. By the time he, too, departed, it was almost forgotten that there was meant to be a high king at all - although Gil-Galad’s name was still celebrated in song.

On the other side of the sea, newly returned on shaky legs, Fingon was informed by his father that he apparently had a son.

“Do I really?” he replied, dazed. He and Fingolfin both knew enough of the plots and schemes of monarchy not to speak of it publically.

The reborn Finduilas had retreated to Lórien to recover, as did many. There, the attendant maiar found her scrutinising a mosaic of the death of High King Ereinion; “Why,” she asked, with a hint of warning in her voice. “Is that black-haired ellon labelled ‘Artanáro’?”

Eärendil, who had watched the whole affair from on high, only laughed.

 

The problem is that no one ever bothered to explain any of this to Pengolodh.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't mean to be shady about Sindarin rule over Nandor/Avari/Silvan elves, but there is something uncomfortably colonialist about it all, which by the Sixth Age post-colonialist elf historians take some issues with. If you're wondering how Valinorean historians managed to come to this (of course contentious) conclusion about the 'truth', then it was partially the advances in submarine technology for archaeology of drowned Beleriand and Númenor, and in large part the really intense use of telepathic historiographical studies on reborn volunteers, because everyone involved is an asshole who wouldn't just tell them.
> 
> "Why would they call them all Pseudo-Ereinion if that's only accurate for one of them?" Historical tropes are wild. Why do we call Augustus an emperor, or Ancestral Puebloans 'Anasazi'? Why do we call the period between Late Antique and Early Modern 'Middle Ages', and still define the Egyptian Old Kingdom by pyramids? We just copy what went before, even if we know it's wrong or outdated. I thought historians all being forced to use an inaccurate title for the Artanáros because the first person who came up with this theory liked 'Ereinion' and hadn't discovered when it was first used yet would be a funny example of the problems of accepted terminology.
> 
> The Noldor in this fic in theory follow the system of succession known as agnatic primogeniture. This is because while Tolkien was building his beautiful diverse world of different societies, he failed to include even one in which women could inherit the throne (until Númenor). Check the family trees of any royal family in this universe for ignored women if you think I'm wrong. The Sindar in this fic have a different system out because of my frustration with this, even though canonically they are probably just as sexist.


End file.
